A lightweight, dark, keyboard-driven music sorter for triaging large libraries. Point it at a folder, then shuffle, audition, delete to trash, and quick-move tracks into target folders without ever lifting your hands off the keyboard. Built as a native GTK4 / GStreamer application - one small binary, no Electron, no embedded browser.

The palette is deliberately warm and very dark: easy on the eyes at night, dim enough to leave running while you fall asleep (as I tend to do this before bed, lol), but every control stays legible. Everything - colours, settings, keybindings, quick-move slots - is editable inside the app and in a single persistent config file, in the spirit of mpv.

Features

• Load a library via the folder picker or a path argument (recurses into subfolders by default).
• Shuffle the whole library, keeping the current track playing.
• Delete → OS trash, never a permanent unlink. Press D; undo with U.
• Quick-move slots - pin a target folder to each slot, then move the playing file there instantly with the number keys. Configurable from 1 to 9 slots; assign a folder with Ctrl+number or the pencil button on each slot.
• Right-click "Move to…" - right-click the player or any track in the list to move it to a quick slot, a recent destination, or any folder you browse to. Recent destinations are remembered automatically (the count is configurable).
• Multi-level undo for deletes and moves (U / Ctrl+Z). Trashed files are pulled back out of the freedesktop trash; moved files are returned.
• Waveform + scrubbing - peaks are extracted with GStreamer and drawn with Cairo; click or drag anywhere on the wave to seek. J/L seek back/forward.
• Auto-advance to the next track when one ends (toggleable).
• Optional visualizer with several muted themes (V), fed by GStreamer's spectrum element.
• Metadata (ID3/tag) editing - tags are read always; editing is off by default and enabled with a settings toggle (E). Powered by lofty for audio formats and midly for MIDI (title maps to the MIDI TrackName meta-event). Works across formats, including .mid/.midi.
• MIDI support - .mid and .midi files load and play back via GStreamer's MIDI synth pipeline. Format, track count, BPM, time signature, key, and instrument names appear in the player subtitle when present in the file. The waveform display shows a note density graph so you can still scrub through the track.
• Everything is configurable - General / Keybindings / Quick slots / Theme tabs, plus a raw Config file editor for total control. Rebind any action to any key; codes are physical-key based, so layout and numpad keys behave predictably.
• Handles all common audio formats (mp3, flac, ogg, opus, wav, m4a/aac, aiff, wma, …) plus MIDI (.mid/.midi). Playback depends on the installed GStreamer plugins; file operations work regardless.

Install

tunesort is a plain GTK4 / libadwaita / GStreamer application, so it runs on any Linux desktop - GNOME, KDE Plasma (X11 or Wayland), Cinnamon, XFCE, … - as long as those libraries are present. The icons it uses are compiled into the binary, so it looks the same under every icon theme, and its desktop entry and app icon are named after its application id (io.github.theelderemo.tunesort), which is what Wayland compositors such as KWin use to match windows to launchers.

Ubuntu / Debian - .deb package

Each release includes a .deb. It declares every runtime dependency, including the GStreamer plugin sets needed for playback, so this is all it takes:

sudo apt install ./tunesort_*_amd64.deb

Prebuilt binary (Linux x86_64)

Each release also includes a tarball with the tunesort binary, its desktop entry and its icon, built on GitHub's current ubuntu-latest runner. Check it against SHA256SUMS.txt, then:

tar -xzf tunesort-*-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
install -Dm755 tunesort ~/.local/bin/tunesort
install -Dm644 io.github.theelderemo.tunesort.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/io.github.theelderemo.tunesort.desktop
install -Dm644 io.github.theelderemo.tunesort.png ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/512x512/apps/io.github.theelderemo.tunesort.png

The binary links GTK4, libadwaita and GStreamer dynamically, so the runtime packages from Dependencies must be installed, and ~/.local/bin has to be on your PATH for the launcher entry to work. It is built against one distro's library versions; if it refuses to start on an older or very different system, build from source instead.

Build from source

You need the Rust toolchain plus the build packages from Dependencies (glib-compile-resources, used to bundle the icons, ships with the GLib development package they pull in). Then:

cargo build --release
install -Dm755 target/release/tunesort ~/.local/bin/tunesort
install -Dm644 assets/io.github.theelderemo.tunesort.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/io.github.theelderemo.tunesort.desktop
install -Dm644 assets/io.github.theelderemo.tunesort.png ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/512x512/apps/io.github.theelderemo.tunesort.png

Dependencies

GStreamer plugins are loaded at runtime: -base (playbin) and -good (audio sinks, spectrum) are required, -bad provides the MIDI synth, -ugly and libav cover the remaining codecs, and a General MIDI soundfont is needed for .mid / .midi playback.

Distro	Build packages	GStreamer plugins + soundfont
Ubuntu / Debian	build-essential libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev	gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-pipewire fluid-soundfont-gm
Fedora	gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel gstreamer1-devel gstreamer1-plugins-base-devel	gstreamer1-plugins-base gstreamer1-plugins-good gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-fluidsynth gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free gstreamer1-plugin-libav pipewire-gstreamer (patent-encumbered codecs: gstreamer1-plugins-ugly from RPM Fusion)
Arch	gtk4 libadwaita gstreamer gst-plugins-base	gst-plugins-good gst-plugins-bad gst-plugins-ugly gst-libav gst-plugin-pipewire soundfont-fluid
openSUSE	gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel gstreamer-devel gstreamer-plugins-base-devel	gstreamer-plugins-base gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-bad-fluidsynth gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-libav gstreamer-plugin-pipewire fluid-soundfont-gm

The prebuilt binary only needs the runtime libraries (libgtk-4-1 libadwaita-1-0 on Ubuntu / Debian, otherwise the non--devel packages the build packages depend on) plus the plugin column.

Run

tunesort                  # open the app
tunesort ~/Music          # load a library on start

Default keybindings

Key	Action	Key	Action
Space / K	Play / pause	D	Delete → trash
→	Next track	S	Shuffle
←	Previous track	U / Ctrl+Z	Undo last delete/move
↑ / ↓	Volume up / down	O	Open library
L / J	Seek forward / back	,	Settings
M	Mute	V	Toggle visualizer
1–9 / numpad	Quick-move to slot	E	Toggle metadata editor
Ctrl+1–9 (numpad)	Assign folder to slot

All of these are remappable in Settings → Keybindings.

Configuration

The config lives at ~/.config/tunesort/config.json (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME). It is written whenever you change something in the app, and re-read on launch. You can edit it by hand, or from Settings → Config file - invalid JSON is rejected, and unknown or missing keys are merged against the defaults so upgrades never wipe your edits.

Top-level keys: library_path, settings, theme, quickslots, recent_destinations, keybindings. The number of active quick slots (quickslot_count) and how many recent destinations to remember (max_recent_destinations) live under settings. See src/config.rs for the full default set.

How it works

• src/config.rs - load / save / merge of the JSON config.
• src/library.rs - scanning, shuffle, trash / move with a multi-level undo stack.
• src/metadata.rs - lofty tag read / write for audio; midly tag read / write for MIDI (reads TrackName, Tempo, KeySignature and more for display; writes TrackName for the editable title field).
• src/player.rs - a GStreamer playbin wrapper for playback, async waveform peak extraction, MIDI note-density waveform fallback, and the spectrum-fed visualizer.
• src/ui.rs - the GTK4 UI, the action registry, and keyboard dispatch.
• src/main.rs - entry point and application bootstrap.
• build.rs - compiles the icons in assets/icons into a GResource that is embedded in the binary.

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.